Live TV and internet coverage allowed the nation to feel grubby as the Mandybill was shunted through the House of Commons late last night. The government’s replacement for Clause 18 – a catch-all illiberal web-blocking measure that few in the music business ever expected to survive – was approved, and the photographers cemented a spectacular victory by crushing the orphan works clause.

The American Society of Media Photographers has sued Mountain View over Google Book Search, the library-scanning project that's already the subject of an unusually controversial lawsuit from American authors and publishers.

UC
Unified Communications (UC) fixes fragmented workplace communications, right? But if businesses implement UC and carry on working in pretty much the same way as before (albeit more efficiently), they are probably missing a trick or two.

Review
Pitched as a competitor against the likes of the Acer’s easyStore line of Windows Home Server-based Nas boxes, Asus brings us the TS Mini home server. Based on Intel’s 1.66GHz Atom N280 processor, the TS Mini can be configured with up to 2GB of 800MHz DDR 2 memory and houses two 3.5in Sata drive bays.

Workshop
Here’s a story, which may or may not be true. A long, long time ago, a UNIX sys admin was having a problem with some of his users, who thought it was really funny to download explicit photos from the then still-fledgling Internet and pop them up on other people’s screens.

While the Lib Dems may have no qualms about running Anna Arrowsmith, a maker of serious female-oriented porn as a candidate in Gravesham, Kent, UKIP are having some difficulty swallowing the notion that one of their candidates may have been involved at the sharp end of smut-making.

RIP
When I first met Guy Kewney, who died early this morning after a long struggle with cancer, he was already firmly established as star columnist at Personal Computer World - then, and for years to come, the UK's flagship IT publication. Until he started working for The Register a couple of years back, that was one of the few occasions when we found ourselves working on the same team.

Review
If you want a laptop to impress, then a likely choice is a high-end MacBook rather than an amorphous black box Windows notebook, that looks about as cool as a fridge-freezer. With admiring glances in mind, is Dell's Inspiron Latitude Z, a machine the company is heralding as the thinnest and most stylish 16in laptop around.

Updated
It’s a bit premature to declare winners and losers from the Digital Economy Bill just yet. The Open Rights Group may have given up campaigning – having already turned its front page into a giant click-through recruitment poster* - but the fight's not over. The legislation may yet fall.

A blog owner can avoid liability for user-generated content that appears on his site without being checked or moderated, the High Court has ruled. But fixing the spelling or grammar in users' posts could lose him that protection, it said.

IBM has been chasing customers using Sun Microsystems' Sparc-based servers for more than a decade. Now that Sun is part of the much-stronger Oracle collective, Big Blue is trying a different tactic - going after the channel partners who distribute Sun systems.

When announcing iPhone OS 4.0, Steve Jobs said that Apple has "no plans to become a worldwide ad agency" - but it appears that he's planning to do just that. Jobs' goal: to get one billion ad impressions per day by the end of the year.

Forrester Research today upped its forecasts for spending on IT wares this year, thanks in large part to a slightly faster recovery in the United States than the market prognosticators expected when they did their initial projections back in January.